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M I G U E L  G A L L A R D O  
J O U R N E Y  T O  T H E  H E A R T  
O F  P U L P  
OF ALL THE SURVIVORS OF THE BARCELONA UNDERGROUND, 
GALLARDO IS PERHAPS THE ONE WHOSE GRAPHICS ARE THE MOST 
VERSATILE. HIS DISCOURSE, ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX, OFTEN 
CONCEALS A HARSH CRITICISM OF MODERNITY. 
J O R D l  C O S T A  J O U R N A L I S T  
C A T A L ~ N I A  
COMICS 
MIGUEL GALLARDO. El VlGlA DE L'EST. L'HOME INVISIBLE, PRATS & REY EDITORS. BARCELONA, 1989 
L. magine a place where Sidney the Elephant, Dalí-brand soft watches, Gerald McBoing, 
Elvis Costello, Chester Gould's bad- 
dies, the invaders from Mars dressed 
by William Cameron Menzies, the 
Picassian synthesis, the emblematic 
chicken that advertises Avecrem soup, 
the door that opens onto the Twilight 
Zone, the inordinate eyes from the 
dream in  Recuerda before being 
wounded by those hypertrophied scis- 
sors with their Freudian symbolism, 
Modigliani's languorous women, a 
spaceman right out of the fifties and a 
whole lot more creatures from the most 
disparate sentimental and aesthetic 
universes could al1 live happily to- 
gether. I'm not talking about the Garden 
of Eden. And it's not the junk room in 
the den of some omnivorous cultural 
consumer: it's the poster for the latest 
exhibition by Miguel Gallardo, from 
Lleida, a man who has managed to en- 
dow his paintbrush with a capacity for 
levelling which is similar to death's. 
Tal1 and short, noble and plebeian, 
sublime and abominable, Picasso and 
Avecrem, al1 merge into a single being 
under Gallardo's brushwork. The exhi- 
bition had the title Pulp Art, a term 
coined by Carles Prats, who always 
finds the right word and who also con- 
tributed a solid theoretical basis to the 
selection of the artist's work: Pulp Art, 
according to Prats, is a kind of false 
Pop Art fed on recognizable references 
-to consumer objects, comic strip cha- 
racters, strictly everyday objects- but 
not with the more or less realistic 
vocation that inspired Warhol and his 
followers on their crusade against 
abstract expressionism, but with the 
risky objective of abandoning the 
spectator to cryptic or alarming inte- 
rior worlds. Even so, the Gallardo- 
Working-Class-Artist who creates 
such extraordinary pictorial items of 
Pulp Art is relatively recent: behind 
him lies a brilliant career in illustrated 
comic strips which speaks for his sur- 
prising ability to decipher the keys to 
his surroundings. 
Of al1 the survivors of the Barcelona un- 
derground, Gallardo's drawing is pos- 
sibly the most versatile, his discourse 
one of the most complex, though his 
work has never shown the temptation 
for gravity that distinguishes, say, the 
latest Max from the daring comic strip 
Nosotros somos los muertos. His vision 
of the world has never been so desper- 
ately gloomy as that of the untamable 
and prodigious Martí, either, although 
some of his more recent work seems to 
rival in its hallucinatory qualities the 
frequent trips into the inner he11 of the 
creator of Doctor Vértigo. With an 
approach that could be described as 
COMICS 
~ -. . -  
, ,  ........ _ ....... _.... _,_... . . .  . . . ... .... - . . .  ... . ... .. 
;UELGAUARDO. ESTADOS ALTERADOS. ELV~BOR~, No. 63. ED. IAcÚPuIA. BARCELONA. 1988 
COMICS 
MWELGAUARDO. SAM~ CANLITOAI ESTI~OMIR~.  ELV/BORA, No. 100. ED. LA ~ W W .  BARCELONA, 1988 
halfway between Rabelais and Fellini, 
Gallardo seems to make each of his 
comic strips into a festival -often the 
explicit subject of his stern chastise- 
ment of Modernity. His pages are some- 
times like crowded dinner parties, 
rowdy static choreographies, arbitrary 
agglomerations of characters, colours 
and symbols removed with surgical pre- 
cision from imaginary alien, sometimes 
antithetical universes. This apparent le- 
vity, contrasting with the latest Max, 
and the radical use of colour and hare- 
brained comedy, which put him on an 
orbit far out from the planet Martí, don? 
stop him bringing out the complex me- 
chanisms in his work that will derange 
the reader once and for al1 and drive him 
over the edge. 
The very definition of Pulp Art, as art 
that looks at the inner pulp of things, 
shows that today's Gallardo is an artist 
given over to introspection, a creator 
who, following the cannibalization of 
al1 the different landmarks of the his- 
tory of art -of art with a capital 'A' and 
of art with a small 'a', of course- seems 
to have withdrawn into a fertile solip- 
sism which some readers may find im- 
penetrable. But before this, Gallardo 
was a comic strip illustrator with 
twenty -or twenty thousand- windows 
open onto the world around him. Along 
with Juanito Mediavilla -his scriptwri- 
ter and mentor, as well as one of the 
most astonishing word-tamers our 
country's comic has ever known-, 
Gallardo provided the angriest -and 
also the most festive- portrayal of the 
Barcelona of the seventies with Las 
aventuras de Makoki, a work which be- 
gan life under the graphic infíuence of 
E.C. Segar -the father of Popeye- and 
which brought together a repertory of 
characters as extraordinarily credible 
as they were impossible, who had no- 
thing to envy the curious creations of 
the "Thimble Theater". Makoki, an es- 
caped lunatic with nitroglycerine in his 
veins and a headpiece for electroshock 
treatment as his main sign of identity, 
led a sinister gang of underworld cha- 
racters in an urban and human land- 
scape full of transparent references to 
the Barcelona of the time, character- 
ized by its seething marginal culture 
and the anti-everything approach that 
was soon to lose its point. 
The fact that the adventures of Makoki 
have managed to outlive their topicality 
to become a timeless classic with no 
sell-by date confirms the youthful matu- 
rity of the Gallardo-Mediavilla part- 
nership. But Gallardo's eye and ear 
didn't end with the seventies: the birth 
of Modernity, this epidemic of tom- 
foolery that affected the cream of the 
country's cultural scene, found its own 
private Torquemada in the figure of 
COMICS 
Gallardo, the author of the pitiless work 
Las aventuras de Pepito Magefesa, an 
irnmortal jewel, a complete catalogue of 
winks and nudges, private and public 
jokes, mind-blowing caricatures and 
inexorable snippets from life. Its uni- 
verse of Argentine psychoanalysts, di- 
vine artistes, ridiculous dilettantes, evil 
fat men, avenging comic illustrators and 
aloof design queens, brought to life by a 
veritable uproar of seasonal jargon, 
vogue words and verbal mutations, was 
an early step on the path towards the 
pop expressionism of the latest 
Gallardo, but it still worked perfectly as 
a mirror of an age that was crying out 
for the thrashing that Pepito Magefesa 
and his merciless creator dealt out to it 
page after page. 
The adventures of Pepito Magefesa 
were the proof: Gallardo devoured every- 
- 
,,,,d. PEPITOMAGEFESA. CAIRO. NORMA ED. BARCELONA, 1982 
thing, from the painting of the masters 
to the worst film the cinema-goer can 
conceive of. Soon, though, his voracity 
led him to lose interest in the world out- 
side (the ridiculous "Modelnidad" of 
the eighties was unquestionably more 
interesting than the Mediocrity that 
dominated the nineties) and gave him- 
self up to a suggestive and -what a 
wonderful word- post-modern game. 
Involuntarily becoming the ideological 
heir to Frank Henenlotter -director of 
trash cinema and formulator of the the- 
ory that an abysmally bad film trans- 
cends its condition and is transported to 
a superior aesthetic plane-, Gallardo is 
apparently intent on grovelling in the 
sewers of art. His referentes now are to 
the third-rate: cheap novels, atrocious 
films, forgotten cartoon characters. 
With them he creates aesthetic edifices 
that look like cliches but in fact are mi- 
rages of cliches, because the reader 
soon senses that this accumulation of 
cornmonplaces, outline characters and 
substandard writing don't make up a 
conventional second-rate work, but a 
strange game, enigmatic, obscure and 
absorbing, that fascinates some and 
horrifies others. Gallardo's aesthetic 
adventure is unexplored territory. He 
can always turn back (his latest comic 
strips uf Perico Carambola en la cresta 
de la cola in a Barcelona newspaper are 
one example: his transgression of the 
Bruguera format bring to mind Pepito 
Magefesa, both in its style and in its ten- 
dency to satirize current affairs), but his 
most faithful readers hope he won't, 
that he'll go on, and they rub their hands 
in anticipation of the forthcorning Viaje 
al Centro de la Pulpa. 4 


Miguel Gallardo. Journey to the Heart of Pulp

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